High Intensity Training

In the past I read about high intensity training (HIT), mainly the version associated with Mike Mentzer, but I didn’t appreciate his theories as much as I admired his physique. I started to read about it once again, have been training HIT style for about two weeks and I must say I am already seeing good results.

HIT seeks to increase workout intensity at the expense of volume and frequency. In practice what that means is you have to maximize muscle time under tension by executing all movements in a slow and controlled fashion, having short or no rest intervals between sets and exercises. Also as you are keeping the muscle under tension longer by slowing down the execution, you don’t need to perform as many sets as conventional routines.

All the theory and scientific studies about it you can read on the book Body by Science that I am currently reading. Also recommended are the bulletins about exercise and fitness wrote by Arthur Jones, who popularized HIT in the 70’s. They can be read here.

Corporate Warrior Podcast

It might sound strange a podcast about High Intensity Training and entrepreneurship but that’s exactly what this excellent podcast is about. The podcast presented by Lawrence Neal brings several known experts in diverse areas related to health, business and lifestyle. As I’m reading about HIT right now I’m focusing on episodes related to that. A few interesting ones:

Bill DeSimone, episodes one and two.

Drew Baye.

Also by registering in the podcast website you can download a book with several episode transcripts for free. I’m reading it and it is worth it.

Friedrich Gernsheim

How come I didn’t hear about this German composer before? Having been listening to his symphonies and they sound to me halfway between Beethoven and Tchaikovsky: orchestrated a bit more colorfully than the former but more strict in form than the latter. I recommend symphonies 3 and 4.

Bitcoin

I was sucked into the hype and bought some Bitcoins. I’m not planning to get rich or anything, just to have some fun and not being alienated of conversations in my workplace. What interests me the most is the technology behind Bitcoin, and what things like blockchains can enable in the future. I’m trying to get my hands on more technical readings about the cryptocurrency and so are reading Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies by Narayanan et all. Read a free draft of the book here.

While we are on the topic but super late to Bitcoin party it might be worth to check the list of cryptocurrencies involving interesting technologies put together by John McAfee. I think it might point to coins that will rise in price in the future.

YOLO Neural Networks

I will be starting graduate school next year and my research will probably involve neural networks. I always thought neural networks were too slow for real-time image recognition but my supervisor brought the YOLO paper to my attention. I still have to read it throughly and understand it but from what I could gather traditional convolutional networks used in image recognition apply the model at multiple locations and scales on an image while YOLO networks (You Only Look Once), as the name says, apply a single neural network to the full image. I hope to be able to use them for performing real-time object tracking.

Great times are coming! Wish me luck!